me working out ONG 35

It's just something that jumped out at me...something that I've looked over in studying these wisdom statements.

"Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them."

To literate society, these are just wisdom statements with some sort of logic possessed within them. However, nowadays nobody would say that a person who has a great memory of these statements would be wise...nowadays if someone were to say to me something proverbial like say I come in late to this 9 am class and say, "Aww, my back is killing me! I was up till 3 last night." and someone responds saying,

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

I'm not 100% sure how I would respond...it's possible that I might just give him an incredulous stare....I imagine I could come up with a response eventually, but it would probably just be "ummm, yeah" or something to that effect.

However surprising it may be that these proverbs were knowledge to people in the world today, it makes sense to a pre-literate society. Just like we were talking about in class, if you can't write something down then you have to remember it, and of course the best way to remember it is to make it formulaic, as in rhyming or in verse.
Can you imagine the first shift, that is from the oral culture with knowledge contained in formulaic sayings to a literate culture where knowledge can be saved in writing and not necessarily simply remembered?

It's actually easy to imagine since we have many proverbs from the previous oral culture with us here today, such as the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, and new proverbs are being invented all the time throughout human history, such as Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richards Almanack, where the above proverb was taken.

The interesting thing to think of is that people at one time actually read these collected sayings to GAIN knowledge. It doesn't seem like knowledge at all, because we are so immersed in literacy...I guess that's why I looked over it.